Amedia Norway Sports: Live Streaming 3,000 Matches to 63 Local Newspapers in 2018

Media associated with this campaign

Overview of this campaign

Norway’s Amedia has evolved from a traditional local newspaper company to a highly successful digital news subscription operation, with live sports videos as a key ingredient in the customer value proposition. Amedia’s pivot to digital subscriptions and content development strategy have created impressive YonY growth in subscribers for several years. Local sports is our NHL, our Premier League. Back in the day, our newspapers wrote a story on yesterday’s event for the morning edition.Today the obvious thing to do is to livestream the event. The twofold objective of last year’s revamp of our live sports offering was to: 1) Increase subscription sales through a more relevant live sports package. 2) Reduce churn among subscribers, through a more relevant live sports package. Our method was redesigning the site for better findability, harnessing and extending the existing sports operation in our 63 newspapers, scaling up and coordinating our existing live-setup – and signing up new streaming rights. The site has been redesigned twice during 2018, once at the start of the year, and once towards the end of the year (recently relaunched) - for mobile-optimized findability. The vertical lives both on all newspapers and as a stand-alone site. Our network of 63 local news properties are vital in harnessing the potential of live sports. If a newspaper produces all its home games, another on the other side of the country produces the away games. Also, Norwegians tend to move around. So all the matches - however local - are available to the subscribers of any of our newspapers across the country. We wanted our new vertical to play to network’s strength. Also, in 2018 we’ve scaled-up our efforts in being everywhere with high quality – cheaply. A typical production team consists of two persons and a backpack: One photographer and one commentator, who also does live score graphics and replays. To top it off, we penned deals in new, local sports categories, such as hockey, handball, volleyball and basketball

Results for this campaign

The Norway Sports initiative has strengthened local newspapers’ bond to their communities by bringing viewers closer to their local sports teams. It has also been a key factor in Amedia’s pivot from a traditional newspaper company to a successful digital subscription business. Key results in 2018: 1) 3,000 streamed matches in all sports 2) 158 percent growth in terms of unique users on sports content 3) 31% digital subscription growth – from 170,000 to 223,000 4) Churn reduction from 10% to below 5% 5) Extremely strong viewership numbers - the record being 26.529 viewers on a match in a town with 55.000 inhabitants.

Organization: We’ve trained press photographers to become digital video producers. Sports writers to become live commentators. Coordination: We routinely handle massive amount of simultaneous streams. A central video desk with five employees working shifts oversees daily production and edit the site. Workflow: At most venues there is little or no broadband or proper camera platforms. Some even lack electricity. We have built an efficient and stable workflow with 4G bonding encoders, extension cords and a lot of elbow grease. Design: The number of games and sports we stream have grown so rapidly that we have had to redesign the site twice during 2018 to make it easier for viewers to find their favourite game. The newest redesign was beta-launched in January 2019. Rights: We increasingly have sports federations and teams approach us to discuss streaming. Children’s tournaments often beg us to stream their matches. Precisely because we reach the local audiences; the parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins that make up the local community. We have forged a stronger bond to our subscribers by offering them a sports product they clearly love.